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Trading on Thin Air

Trading on Thin Air explains the methods used by the financial oligarchy in the past to extract the wealth of the nation and shows how the same strategy is being used today to subvert a movement for conservation and sustainability and harness it in order to create the next big bubble.

My Brother the Islamist

Barking, East London, patriotic crowds gather as a regiment of soldiers from the 1st Battalion of Royal Anglians return home from Afghanistan. The author of the documentary, Robb Leech, is there to see a soldier too.

Money and Life

Money and Life is a passionate and inspirational essay-style documentary that asks a provocative question: can we see the economic crisis not as a disaster, but as a tremendous opportunity?

Craig Venter: Designing life

Some regard him as the most important scientist since Darwin. But he himself is only a little more modest. For the first time now, he can actually design life in a computer, make the DNA software, and create new life forms that have never existed before.

This Is What Winning Looks Like

This is a disturbing, new documentary about the ineptitude, drug abuse, sexual misconduct, and corruption of the Afghan security forces as well as the reduced role of US Marines due to the troop withdrawal.

Young Kids, Hard Time

Behind every crime headline there is mountain of tragedy for everyone involved. Wabash Valley Correctional Facility in Southwestern Indiana is a vault for these headlines. Twenty one hundred prisoners locked up for everything from rape to murder.

SHADOWS OF LIBERTY
Shadows of Liberty reveals the phenomenal truth behind the news media: censorship, cover-ups and corporate control. The documentary takes a journey through the darker corridors of the American media landscape, where global conglomerates exercise extraordinary political, social, and economic power.

INSIDE THE KLAN
The KKK has had a surge in popularity, mostly because of the US’s first black president. The Klan claim to have softened, but can an organisation racist to its core really be as benign as they make out?

THE MONEY LOBBY
They say money is the root of all evil. Well, nowhere is this more true than in US politics. The 2012 US presidential and congressional elections were the most expensive in history, costing six billion dollars.

COLOUR OF WAR
Colour of War is a very good documentary about WWII and how it affected life around the world between 1940 and 1945. The entire documentary is a collection of authentic images, all in colour, of which a lot have been previously unreleased. Some images can be quite shocking at times and no doubt leave you with a bitter impression on how horrible war can be. The commentator also reads out a lot of letters or diary fragments from people who lived or died during World War II. Knowing this, you might think that the documentary in a whole would loose coherence but it’s quite the opposite because even though “Colour of War” is mainly a collection of authentic images and letters it felt like everything fitted together very well.

THE GREAT CULLING: OUR WATER

The Great Culling of the human race already has begun. Covertly, insidiously, mercilessly, a global depopulation agenda has been launched. As this plays out, the vast majority of the human race will be removed from the gene pool. Genetically annihilated. Will you and your genetic lineage survive?

America’s Medicated Kids

In America’s Medicated Kids, Louis Theroux travels to one of America’s leading children’s psychiatric treatment centres, in Pennsylvania, to learn and understand what drives parents to put their kids on drugs.

The Man Who Hunts Spy Satellites

Thierry Legault is not your average amateur astronomer, inviting the kids over and pointing a dinky backyard telescope at the Big Dipper. He’s a renowned astrophotographer, painstakingly chronicling the orbits of planets, distant galaxies, spaceships, and—to the chagrin of the intelligence community—of the spy satellites we’re not supposed to see.

Sex, Death And The Gods

This BBC documentary focuses on the Devadasi young Indian girls denied the chance to marry after being ‘dedicated’ to a deity or temple. Many spend the remainder of their lives involved in prostitution despite laws which make the practice illegal.

A River of Waste: The Hazardous Truth About Factory Farms

A heart-stopping new documentary, A RIVER OF WASTE exposes a huge health and environmental scandal in our modern industrial system of meat and poultry production. Some scientists have gone so far as to call the condemned current factory farm practices as “mini Chernobyls.” In the U.S. and elsewhere, the meat and poultry industry is dominated by dangerous uses of arsenic, antibiotics, growth hormones and by the dumping of massive amounts of sewage in fragile waterways and environments. The film documents the vast catastrophic impact on the environment and public health as well as focuses on the individual lives damaged and destroyed.

The Codes of Gender

The Codes of Gender applies the late sociologist Erving Goffman’s ground-breaking analysis of advertising to the contemporary commercial landscape, showing how one of American popular culture’s most influential forms communicates normative ideas about masculinity and femininity, the relationship between gender and power, and the everyday performance of cultural norms.

Tomorrow’s World

Tomorrow’s World delves in to the world of invention, revealing the people and technologies set to transform all our lives. Liz Bonnin examines the conditions that are promising to make the 21st century a golden age of innovation and meets some of the world’s foremost visionaries, mavericks and dreamers.

Deportee Purgatory

Each year, more than 30 million people flow between the US and Mexico through the San Ysidro Port of Entry, the busiest land-border crossing in the world. Situated between San Diego and Tijuana, at one time the area around San Ysidro was a prime spot to cross illegally into the US. But in 1994, Operation Gatekeeper expanded the border wall and increased the number of checkpoints. With the more recent addition of unmanned drone patrols along the border, Tijuana has become one of the most fortified border points in the Americas. Border crossers have been forced to turn to alternative sites of crossing, such as the Sonoran Desert, where hundreds of people die each year.

Rise of the Superbugs

Antibiotics are the wonder drugs of modern medicine. They’ve allowed doctors to save and extend life by killing infection and enabling ground breaking surgery. But imagine a world where antibiotics don’t work – that would be a place dominated by superbugs, bacteria that don’t respond to antibiotics. Scientists say this would end many modern medical procedures and they claim the threat is greater than we realise. Rampant use of antibiotics coupled with an explosion in global travel has led to superbugs spreading worldwide. Rise of the Superbugs steps into the lab with leading experts on antibiotic resistance, and listen to shocking stories of the health implications. Let’s face up to the horror of antibiotic resistance before it’s too late.

Unveiled and Lifted

In the current anxiety concerning overpopulation, pollution, ecological imbalance, and the potential of disasters of nuclear fusion, it is only seldom recognized that governed nations have become self destroying institutions, paralyzed and bogged in their own complications, and suffocated beneath mountains of paper.

Sext Up Kids

In Sext Up Kids, teens and pre-teens show and tell what they are doing and why they are doing it. Experts reveal startling new research, tracking how the pressure to be sexy is changing teen and sexual behaviour in alarming ways, as “anal becomes the new oral.”

This (Illegal) American Life

From a small town in Oaxaca, Mexico, and from a kitchen table in East Los Angeles, from a flophouse in a coastal farming town, to a strip-mall in Phoenix, Arizona, these are snapshots of illegal immigration in America. It’s estimated that as many as 12 million people are living in United States illegally, but this story is about just two.

Women and the Bible: Status of Women in the Old Testament Laws

By Austin Cline, About.com Guide
[REPRINT]

If a god created humanity, then it created half of all that humanity as one gender (male) and half of another gender (female). And how was the latter half treated by the former half through history? Pretty badly, for the most part. It isn’t surprising to find this trend continued among the ancient Hebrews, but should we expect an all-loving God to support and reinforce such misogyny?

In Numbers, chapter 5, we find this god giving Moses commands about what to do with jealous husbands. The first thing to note is that this god apparently doesn’t care about jealous wives — if they suspect their husband of infidelity, their god offers them no recourse.

The second thing to note is that the husband requires no evidence that his wife has been unfaithful. The whole passage is about a husband who is jealous, nothing more. He merely has to think that his wife has been less than faithful in order for him to bring here before the priests for testing.

And what’s the test? The priest is to gather up dirt from the tabernacle floor, mix it with water, and force the woman to drink the concoction. With the state of sanitation at the time, I’m not sure I want to know what might have lived in that dirt — but any woman with a jealous husband had to consume it. If she was guiltless, nothing would happen as a result of the cursed water. If she was guilty, she would become ill.

Such “trials by fire” were not uncommon in primitive cultures - but should we expect an all-loving god of all humanity to encourage them, much less promote their use on only half his creation? The above is certainly not the only case where women are treated as being inferior to men:

Suppose a man enters into marriage with a woman, but she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her, and so he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her out of his house; she then leaves his house and goes off to become another man’s wife.
(Deut. 24:1-2)

If [the city] accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you at forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the LORD your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil. You may enjoy the spoil of your enemies, which the LORD your God has given you.
(Deut. 20:11-14)

Speak to the people of Israel, saying: If a woman conceives and bears a male child, she shall be ceremonially unclean seven days; as at the time of her menstruation, she shall be unclean. Her time of blood purification shall be thirty-three days; she shall not touch any holy thing, or come into the sanctuary, until the days of her purification are completed. If she bears a female child, she shall be unclean two weeks, as in her menstruation; her time of blood purification shall be sixty-six days.
(Lev. 12:2-5)

A man can divorce a woman merely because he finds something, anything, objectionable about her. A woman, however, appears to be stuck no matter how objectionable the husband is. Women are treated like war booty — if they are virgins, that is. Although this may be preferable to being killed like all the men, it does indicate that virgin women are regarded as little more then property. Bearing a female child renders a mother unclean for twice as long as bearing a male child — apparently, this god views women as being inherently unclean and less worthy. It is not to be wondered at, then, that only men could be priests.

It should not be surprising to find such laws among those written by humans from other cultures — in particular, men. Humans are prejudiced against those who are different, and men have long harbored prejudices against women. Some prejudices have continued to this day. But would a god worthy of even a modicum of our respect really promote laws which treated half of humanity as property and less worthy than the other half.

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Wednesday, June 12